The Kitos War and Jewish Risings Across the Diaspora

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A series of Jewish uprisings against Roman rule broke out across the diaspora while the emperor Trajan campaigned against Parthia in the east, beginning in 115 CE in Cyrenaica under a leader Greek sources call Lukuas or Andreas, and spreading to Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia. Rebels destroyed temples and public buildings in Cyrenaica and Cyprus and fought Roman forces already stretched thin by the Parthian campaign. Trajan dispatched the general Lusius Quietus, whose Latin name the war's later title derives from, to suppress the Mesopotamian rising, while further Roman forces put down the revolts in Egypt and Cyrenaica by 117.

Roman forces suppressed every rising by 117. The Jewish community of Cyprus was effectively destroyed as a presence on the island, and Cyrenaica's Jewish community and much of its urban infrastructure were devastated. Hadrian, succeeding Trajan the same year, focused on stabilizing the empire's eastern frontier rather than further punitive campaigns, though the war's destruction and the tensions of the following decades fed directly into the later Bar Kokhba Revolt.